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Science Superpowers

In the summer of 2008, the journal Nature published a short, illuminating essay that tracked the global migration of scientific research over the centuries, as empires rose and fell. The center of world science, for instance, was in France in 1740, before it moved to Germany, then Britain, and, later, America, carrying with it, in each case, a major dimension of global leadership. The authors—J. Rogers Hollingsworth, Karl H. Müller and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth—have concluded that another scientific superpower is unlikely to emerge with the same dominance as its predecessors. They have also discovered that great shifts in global scientific leadership follow a clear pattern: “Each former scientific power, especially during the initial stages of decline, had the illusion that its system was performing better than it was, overestimating its strength and underestimating innovation elsewhere. The elite could not imagine that the centre would shift.”

American policymakers have begun to notice the relative decline of American strength in science and engineering. U.S. students currently rank twenty-first in science and twenty-fifth in math, near the bottom of the developed world, and the Obama Administration has launched a program called Educate to Innovate, which is designed to jumpstart improvements. Without being alarmist, I want to mention a few facts about China that serve to reinforce how indispensable this campaign is to the future of American competitiveness.

China, for instance, has had a fitful relationship with science. Chairman Mao was wary of the scientific “élite,” and he preached the power of “man over weapons.” But, after Chinese foot soldiers confronted American tanks in Korea, leaders reconsidered, and in 1955 they resolved to build a nuclear weapon—an absurdly audacious target, considering that China didn’t know how to mine uranium, and its people were as poor as citizens of sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the nuclear race galvanized the country—science funding soared six hundred per cent in one year—and, by 1964, China had the bomb—a feat that “offers a caution to those who doubt the commitment of China’s leaders to redress their country’s weakness at all costs,” according to Evan Feigenbaum, an Asia specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the author of “China’s Techno-Warriors.” By the eighties, however, momentum was gone, and Chinese science was in ruins. The 863 Program, which I wrote about in December, sought to recapture the spirit of the atomic race and prepare China for what Chinese-born scientist Qian Xuesen predicted would be the era of “intellectual warfare.”

China also set out to win back its émigrés. Science had never been lucrative—a Chinese saying warned that “researching atomic bombs will never earn as much as selling tea eggs”—and eventually Chinese professionals grew to be the largest group of immigrants in Silicon Valley. In 1994, China launched the 100 Talents program, to lure highly regarded scholars back with the promise of funding and prestige; between 1998 and 2004, nine hundred of them agreed. (For a detailed look, see “China’s Emerging Technological Edge” by Denis Fred Simon and Cong Cao. Also, Adam Segal at the Council on Foreign Affairs produces a stream of valuable work on this subject.) Today, China is one of only six countries involved in decoding the human genome, and the only developing country among them. In 2003, China became the third country to put a man in space. (The head of NASA, Michael Griffin, said in 2007 that he believed “China will be back on the moon before we are.”) In 2005, China passed the United States to become the world’s leading exporter of laptop computers, mobile phones, and digital cameras.

To measure the pace of scientific progress, researchers often examine how much research a country is publishing, and in 1995, China ranked fourteenth in the world in the number of papers it published in science and engineering journals. By 2007, it had climbed past Japan and was now second only to the U.S. The quality—measured by how often those papers were cited—had not grown as fast, but that gap is shrinking, too. Researcher Ronald Kostoff was working in the U.S. Office of Naval Research in 2006, when he co-wrote a five-hundred-page study on the status of Chinese science. Kostoff is retired now, but he keeps up on the numbers and runs analyses of his own now and then. I contacted him recently to get his sense of how comfortable the American lead is in science publishing. “[W]hile China is certainly not in the quality league of the USA overall, they are improving,” he said. “And I believe it is only a matter of time until they are competitive from a quality standpoint.”

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign affairs.